What if trade value was what let you interact with the market?

[Forblaze]

With all of this discussion about clerks, I just thought I'd share an idea I had about trade value.

What if instead of spending energy at the market, you spent trade value? Trade value would become just like any other resource that gets generated and stored and would functionally act like a flex resource to be spent at the market. Commercial pacts could give you a straight multiplier to generated trade value to represent general access to trade. This would add more economic value to having allies, which would reflect real world benefits to having trade. Megacorps could get a big buff to generated trade value as well, reinforcing their flavor of being merchant empires.

This would obviously have a lot of balance implications for economic output in general, but I always felt like trade value should be linked to the market somehow.

 

[RobInconformista]

There is a basic conversion 1tv = 1en; however the receiver has more flexibility in how it's produced - mineral free CGs or pop/building less unity, or with Megacorps & Federations both.

TV is ephemeral like amenities, it's not stored but realised as a resource, that makes the concept muddy.

Perhaps making TV tradeable as a currency would be interesting, used to pay monthly purchases.

 

[Mastikator]

Wouldn't that mean that gestalt empires can never interact with the market?

 

[Lazy Name]

I like the idea of making the market dependent on having a strong trade network, but what would trade value represent in this system? At the moment, trade value acts as a measurement of overall private and civilian economic activity in your empire, which doesn't really make sense as something you can store up and spend.

 

[Forblaze]

I like the idea of making the market dependent on having a strong trade network, but what would trade value represent in this system? At the moment, trade value acts as a measurement of overall private and civilian economic activity in your empire, which doesn't really make sense as something you can store up and spend.

General trade activity that the specifics of which are being retroactively decided upon when the trade value is actually spent. So when you spent 100 trade value on 100 minerals, it turns out your clerks were actually spending those last few months ordering them from your neighbor. What did they trade for? Well when your neighbor buys some food 10 years later, it turns out that was it. The existing market already creates resources of nowhere, so I'm not really worried about justifying where those minerals or whatever come from.

Wouldn't that mean that gestalt empires can never interact with the market?

Just let them start generating trade value then. If you want to make them feel unique, maybe they can only generate it passively from their pops and don't have any jobs that create it explicitly. I'm not sure how it's all balanced out now currently, but pre-3.0 they used to at least have more raw resource jobs than non-gestalt empires because of the bonus jobs from purification plants and the like. So they would be less reliant on trade value anyway since they can just generate those resources directly.

 

[GOLANX]

I think they should seperate energy from credits and trade value is how you get credits where generator districts make energy as just an upkeep resource. Credits are also used as an upkeep resource in some situations such as subsidy edicts that add a credit cost to jobs rather than spending energy to create energy with capacity subsidies

 

[Archael90]

With all of this discussion about clerks, I just thought I'd share an idea I had about trade value.

What if instead of spending energy at the market, you spent trade value? Trade value would become just like any other resource that gets generated and stored and would functionally act like a flex resource to be spent at the market. Commercial pacts could give you a straight multiplier to generated trade value to represent general access to trade. This would add more economic value to having allies, which would reflect real world benefits to having trade. Megacorps could get a big buff to generated trade value as well, reinforcing their flavor of being merchant empires.

This would obviously have a lot of balance implications for economic output in general, but I always felt like trade value should be linked to the market somehow.

That was exactly my idea in the discussion thread about clerks getting slight buff in 3.0.3.
I would aslo suggest that gestalts should be able to produce trade value, maybe not from day 1 (except rouge servitors), but once they establish peaceful contact with another empire - why they would not trade? If we concider GC as single being, then two people (single beings) can trade with eachother, so one gestalt empire should be able to trade with other empires, and thus they have to produce trade value through special job like trader drone or something. This would also open up option for gestalts to create commercial pacts.